In March we welcome South Africa back into the fold – Liesl Jobson has put together a fascinating issue of classic and contemporary. We’re delighted that Ingrid Jonker, an iconic James Dean/ Sylvia Plath figure due to her talent and early death, is finally featured on the site. André Brink summarises her work thus, “In one way or another most of these poems concern an underlying awareness of a relationship – between woman and man, child and parent, you and I, ego and alter ego: and from this ‘double game’ arises a persistent impression of a life left incomplete, broken, shattered, condemned forever to search for the magic word, or the magic potion, which may restore the lost wholeness of the primal couple.”

We can also now read the very impressive Nontsizi Mgqwetho, active in the 1920s, “one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in Xhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession.” Nor to be missed is Mazisi Kunene, said to have reconstructed the identity of the African continent, and Rustum Kozain, an accomplished prize-winning young poet.

Modern leaders looking for a ‘civilised’ way to dominate the world refer to the Roman Empire. Historian Neil Faulkner explained the brutal reality to Ken Olende.

What motivated you to write your new book Rome – Empire Of The Eagles on the history of the Roman Empire?

Most histories, if they aren’t broadly uncritical, tend to make excuses for the Roman Empire. They admit that there was a lot of nastiness such as the massacring of enemies, slavery and gladiators.

But then they point to lots of good things, like towns, roads, central heating, bathhouses and mosaics – as if that cancels the other out.

When we look at a modern society we evaluate it on the basis of what is fundamental to it as a social and political system. People writing about Nazi Germany don’t say it was half good – “You got decent motorways as well as death camps.”

Rome was an exercise in imperialism – the use of physical force to dominate territory, labour and resources – and that is a bad thing.

It is important to be able to engage with that argument. Of course capitalist imperialism is profoundly different from imperialism in the ancient world. But the Roman Empire was no different from any other empire in that it was an exercise in carnage and looting to enrich a few.

You present the story of the empire as a logical progression, covering a vast sweep of time from the founding of Rome to the collapse of the Western Empire.

There is a single thread that runs right the way through the history of the empire.

There was a period of about 250 years from the third century BC to the end of the first century BC when expansion was absolutely dynamic.

In that period Rome went from being the dominant state in central Italy to becoming the greatest empire in the world at the time, dominating the whole of the Mediterranean, and much of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

‘Children who, during pregnancy, have been exposed to nicotine, have severe trouble in adapting their behaviour to circumstances if emotions are at work’, says Hanna Swaab in her inaugural lecture as professor, of today, 4 March.

ULTRASOUNDS SHOW TERRIBLE EFFECTS OF SMOKING ON BABIES “Some alarming new images might make expectant mothers think twice about continuing a smoking habit during pregnancy. Using high-definition ultrasound scans, scientists have shown that maternal smoking can alter the mouth and hand movements of the fetus, a finding that suggests some impairment of the fetus’ central nervous system development.” [HuffPost]

The wave of industrial action that started more than a year ago among Egypt’s textile workers is continuing to escalate, involving ever-wider layers of workers who are demanding wage rises to compensate for the skyrocketing cost of living.

Such struggles were previously fragmented and confined to state-owned industries and the public sector. They have now affected the private sector and coalesced into the biggest wave of industrial militancy since the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Workers are raising national and political demands. Thousands of textile workers at the Ghazl al-Malhalla factory north of Cairo have called for the national minimum wage to be raised to US$218 a month and are acting independently of trade union leaders, who are widely reviled.

Egypt is the largest and most industrialised country in the Arab world. It outlaws all strikes, unless they are sanctioned by the government-controlled General Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions (ETUF), brutally and bloodily suppresses all demonstrations that do not serve the interests of the military and financial elite, and has instituted a raft of market reforms.